Christianity Astray

by Phil Johnson



his post by Rob Bowman over at "Parchment and Pen" last week got me thinking again about the rapid erosion of evangelical distinctives and the major role the editors of Christianity Today have played in muddling the question of what differentiates historic evangelicalism from everything else—including Mormonism's aberrant doctrine of God.

So I hunted up an article published exactly three years ago in CT. It was an editorial that wagged a hypocritical finger at Anglican Church leaders for failing to deal with apostasy in their midst. The piece recounted how the Anglican Communion worldwide (American Episcopalians in particular) got to the point where they are today, rent asunder by a de facto schism over the question of whether sexually-active homosexuals qualify to be bishops in the church.

I clipped and saved that article in December 2004, because the disconnect seemed so profound between what CT's editors said and what they actually do. Their analysis of the Anglicans' failure was right on. But they themselves have been doing the very same thing to the evangelical movement.

The editorial catalogued about a half-century of low points in Episcopalian infidelity, starting with Bishop James Pike, who first openly expressed doubt about the doctrine of the Trinity back in the 1960s. According to the editorial, "[Pike's] fellow bishops, afraid that church discipline would seem medieval to the rest of America, only mildly rebuked him and dropped the issue."

CT's editorial then smugly intoned, "This failure of nerve gradually opened a hole in the church that truckloads of aberrant critics have since driven through."

That's really rich, coming from CT, whose own reportage on Mormon-Evangelical ecumenical rapprochement for more than a decade running hasn't managed to muster any kind of rebuke at all—mild or otherwise—for those within the ranks of CT's own evangelical constituency who have decided Mormonism is sound enough on the Trinity to be regarded as a version of authentic Christianity rather than a quasi-Christian cult.

In fact, the CT editors themselves have apparently accepted a broad enough view of Christ's deity that they are now comfortable saying "Mormons hold firmly to the deity of Christ." Moreover, they're so set in that view that they are not interested in publishing any reviews or articles challenging their position.

But wasn't that precisely the state of things in the Episcopalian Church in the 1960s? Too many Episcopalian leaders were unsure whether Bishop Pike's denial of the Trinity was really all that serious. CT knew better in those days. They understood that Pike's attack on historic and biblical Trinitarianism was a flat-out denial of essential Christian truth.

Today's CT editors are making the very same errors that earlier generation of Episcopal bishops made.

And don't think for a moment that re-imagining Trinitarianism in order to accommodate Mormonism is the only way CT has been demolishing the boundaries of historic evangelicalism. The magazine has consistently treated Open Theism as fodder for opinion polls and evangelical "dialogue." CT's editors have been annoyingly more obsessed with the tone of the conversation than they are with the truth of the issue; more concerned about what's "collegial" than they are with what's biblical. At times, CT's sentiments have even appeared to be on the side of those who reject the historic evangelical commitment to God's full omniscience.

CT's coverage of Emergent neo-liberalism has likewise been unnecessarily generous.

So it was ironic to see an editorial in CT taking a previous generation of Episcopal leaders to task for dealing with 1960's heresies pretty much the same way CT routinely deals with the abandonment of core evangelical principles today.

All that aside, the editorial was essentially correct. The foundation was laid years ago for the current rift in the Anglican movement. In fact, the real roots of the problem go back to Archbishop William Laud in the early 17th century, and Richard Hooker a generation before that. Hooker canonized the principle of via media (the "middle road") as the Anglican approach to Reformation, church polity, and theological controversy. Laud enforced the resulting lukewarmness and formalism of the Anglican hierarchy against everyone in the church who believed Scripture, not politics, should guide the church. Compromise has been central to the ethos of Anglicanism practically since the start of the Protestant Reformation. (Read the CT editorial for a partial inventory of recent Anglican controversies, and realize that these are only the tip of a massive, ancient iceberg.)

What I said last week about Fuller Seminary could be said of Christianity Today as well: CT's proneness to compromise is rooted in its founders' thirst for academic respectability. The pattern has been clear and is getting clearer every day with the increasing radicalization of evangelical fads. Every time a new trend, controversy, or challenge to evangelical principles arises, CT leads a stampede in whatever direction its editors think the via media lies. The resulting dialectic has dragged key sectors of today's evangelical movement into territory some of the most liberated free-thinkers of our grandfathers' generation would have probably deemed too radical.

Christianity Today has been instrumental in opening several holes in the fences around the evangelical movement. They have then paved roads for truckloads of dissidents—who are now doing the same thing to the broader evangelical movement that Bishop Pike and those who came after him did to Anglicanism in the past half century.

I'm certain I'm not the only longtime reader of Christianity Today who has that perspective. I just thought someone should actually say it right out loud.

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